


hearts are said to pound

by skullage



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Identity Issues, M/M, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Pining, Torture, mention of James "Bucky" Barnes/Alexander Pierce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 06:21:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2140386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skullage/pseuds/skullage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time is a flat circle, a constant reliving. The body wants. The body remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hearts are said to pound

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from margaret atwood's "the woman who could not live with her faulty heart". 
> 
> someone once introduced me to the idea of the multiverse and now it follows me wherever i go. 
> 
> this is what happens when you care about bucky barnes too much and don't sleep enough.

At first there is only wind and cold and the force of gravity pulling him down. He is falling. The war is over and he is going home.

The sound of wind and earth rushing to meet him falls away as he does. He sees fresh lain snow, the open vein of running water, the roots of trees, mammoth and incongruous in this otherwise barren plain, but the sound of his own name pushes everything from his mind.

_Bucky?_

As his body turns in midair, the sky bleeds into a crystal blue and the train, a fixed point in your memory, has been replaced by a mouth, speaking, and eyes, disbelieving. Hopeful. The train is long gone by now. You have been falling for years.

_Bucky?_

The man's voice carries so clearly that the note of panicked surprise is audible long after the thunderclap gunfire drowns him out. This man is not a friend, despite what is not remembered. Assets do not have friends. Weapons do not have friends.

_Bucky?_

Assets do not have names scrawled on the side of a coffee cup or a favored tongue spit hastily, hostilely, into an airport lounge or look peaceful when they're sleeping, assets do not sleep. Being or unbeing, they wait. Bucky Barnes dies screaming as he falls. Bucky Barnes dies.

Sergeant. 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8.

_Bucky!_

Sergeant. 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8.

_Bucky!_

Sergeant James Barnes. Where am-

_What is your name._

James Buchanan Barnes. Where am-

_What is your name. What is your purpose._

Barnes, sergeant. What're y-- no, no, no no no no

 

//

 

Bucky's right arm aches with bruises, still healing needle marks and incisions like cartography that he shields from Steve's keen eyes, searching hands, sincere deadly affection, but your left arm feels weightless and numb at the same time and you keep compulsively glancing down to check it's still there, still functioning, hand on the barrel of his rifle. The hands hold and so does the rifle. His body knows what his mind does not.

Captain America and his army of rescues and strays march for weeks, trampling borders into the mud beneath their boots, ravaging Nazi-occupied territory bull-in-china-shop style.

"All that work," Bucky says, eyeing the slopes of Steve's muscles, the height of him, the way you thought of cliffs as big before you fell from one, "and not an ounce o' grace."

His eyes wander and stick for seconds too long. Steve says something about dancing, but his voice hasn't changed and Bucky almost falls over with the force of memory. It's the first thing to bring you back, and it will be the last.

Each time is the same no matter how many lives he relives. You train, you leave, you fight, you bleed, you scream, you march, you follow, you fight, you fight, you fall, you die. Bucky Barnes dies. He dies falling, he dies screaming, he dies a casualty on Zola's table. Steve pulls you off the table. Bucky Barnes dies in the line of duty, not a hero but another unmarked grave, a tooth in the gaping jaw of a military graveyard, flesh piled into a ditch and forgotten, blood in your boots, a man's name on your lips that is not your own, that are not your own. Lips, hands, heart, dick, hard, cold fingers, warm spit, breath in your ear and Steve pressed against your back. Steve's name on Bucky's lips and Steve's cause in Bucky's sight line as he fell, silent, awake.

Imagine him sleeping behind you; imagine it's your own hand and that you'll feel it again; imagine this is not the only chance you'll get before your mind follows where your body is going.

It only happens once.

Bucky dies, over and over again, but, once, the bark scratches his bloody hands bloodier and, once, Steve's hands wrap around him to bring him to a messy, unapologetic climax. He pushes Steve against the tree and sinks to his knees in the mud, body following where his mind has been all along.

Not your mind: your hea-

_What is your name._

Thump-thump.

_What is your name._

Thump-thump.

_What is your name._

Thump-thump.

_What is your name._

Beating weakly, ravaged chest, ground beef on legs, stumbling but walking.

_What is your purpose._

Steve pulls him off the table.

Steve doesn't, but it doesn't matter because even though Bucky dies Steve doesn't.

He pulls Bucky off the table with his hands, off the railing with his hands as the train races deathward and Bucky's body screams even though his throat is raw and he has nothing left to scream. His body wants to die, to go home, but his mind doesn’t follow. Even though Steve reaches with his hands he grabs with his fists and they connect with Bucky’s bones and skin and muscle and the tissue underneath, which cry out and give in, Steve’s fists grinding meat, making ground meat, pulling back and falling until you do the same. Your fists, your words, you’re my mission. And then you fall.

 

//

 

Bucky’s body has been in a state of decay since Zola’s lab. Whatever they pumped into him eats away at his cells, speed reflexes metabolism synapses firing faster, using energy he doesn’t have and can’t produce.

The body wants to die.

The asset’s irony is that It’s body wants something that It cannot, because assets do not want. They are not of wanting or above it, but exist outside it. The asset is fighting in a war and is used to not getting what he wants. The asset doesn’t know that It is used to not wanting because It does not want. But, oh, how he could want.

 

//

 

Bucky Barnes dies. He knows his name up until he has no name to know.

A tragedy in five acts: Bucky Barnes, missing-presumed-dead, is missed. Dead, is living. Alive, is decaying. Frozen, is awake. Devoid, wants, and is found wanting.

Strapped to a chair, he is also strapped to a table, but in both instances he is probably alive, probably awake. At the very least, not dead and not frozen,  _not yet_.

Bucky Barnes dies, an act remarkable only for the life lived before it. An act, unremarked, unremembered.

 _Yet_  comes, is here, is quiet, is bloody, is four armed guards with snapped necks and two with fatal bullet wounds and five with slashed arteries and one man in a pristine suit that brings to mind the word “father” but speaks the word “mother”.

Other words: service, protect, duty, mission, report, mission report, status, operative, stand down, asset, what did you say. Why did you use that name. We haven’t given you that name. You met him before. Earlier assignment. Our parts to play. Mine.

Sometimes the asset will establish a cover and sometimes that cover includes fucking powerful people for their loyalty or for easier access to their deaths. This man in the suit is powerful, his voice soft, his body easy to manipulate with very little pressure, red and sweating. This man’s body will never know true cold, the kind of cold the asset is born into and dies into, but it has known other things.

Teeth clamp down but before the eyes close against the electric current, the asset sees in his mind--the asset sees--

an image appears, not grounded in reality, not heavy in a hand or felt on the skin but he it can hear the sounds and see--

an image of the man in the suit, without the suit. The suit discarded, bundled on the floor at his feet. Just the man. The asset’s metal fingers in the man’s mouth. Faded blonde hair. Blue eyes. White snow. The wind nulls his screams. The current forces them out. No one else realises that It has bitten through the mouth guard until blood runs down It's chin in a tide, a current, a trail, and by that time his tongue has disconnected and his teeth have been cracked. The asset understands fucking because fucking is a function, a duty, a means. The asset does not exist in a world of wanting to fuck this man in the suit the man on the bridge, but his body remembers what his mind forgot, his body wants. And then it does not remember.

Instead, it falls.

 

//

 

Bucky’s body has been in a state of decay since whatever they pumped into him in Zola’s lab activated whatever was growing inside him already. It feels red, and fleeting, but all consuming. It tastes gun metal sharp, dirt and blood under his fingernails, a bullet stuffed into his top pocket for safekeeping, one bullet in the chamber of a semi-automatic strapped to his thigh, in case he loses.

He loses: two toes to frostbite; fingernails, scattering a macabre gingerbread trail behind him all the way back to London; the memory of his mother’s face, the smell of fresh baked bread, the taste of apples. Nicotine lingers on the back of his tongue as it turns to dry sponge and flakes away, useless, unable to give shape to the words that are screams that are broken by the rushing wind, body following his mind, leaving his heart tucked inside Steve’s shield for safekeeping, in case it beats again.

If Bucky did have words, he’d tell Steve that his blonde hair and blue eyes were made for creaseless, virgin snow. That even the wind is kind to him now. That Bucky’s always wanted to go with him to someplace like this but the wind would’ve knocked him down where Bucky couldn’t follow.

Even as he falls, Bucky is still following.

When he lands it isn’t soft. He leaves pieces of himself along that ravine, blood mostly, to float ahead of him down the river. He finds the pieces of himself he lost before: tongue, teeth, toes, terror. He loses an arm reaching for Steve, but at this point it’s just one less thing to worry about. Down here the wind is silent and bitter and his footsteps are light from dragging a skeleton through the snow and this would be the part where his heartbeat fills the emptiness except.

_What is your name._

They are not kind to him, but weapons do not know kindness. Weapons have only makers and handlers, and some weapons do not need to be handled with care.

You glance down compulsively to check it’s still there, still caressing the muzzle of your rifle, except it’s not _your_ rifle. Assets do not own. You bleed a trail from Switzerland to Brooklyn that even skinny, asthmatic, color-blind Steve Rogers could follow, except he doesn’t follow. He leads. He does not find you.

Nevertheless, you are found.

 

//

 

With rations in short supply, so is morale, so is patience. Everything is scarce and they are running out of time, fresh bodies, and options. Bucky chews soft leaves, pretends it’s tobacco or corned hash, sneaks his rations into Steve’s pack, chews rocks like hard candy until his teeth splinter because, what the fuck, he’s dying anyway, he’s already dead. He died the day his conscription came and he died when he told Steve he was shipping out, it was Bucky’s choice to go, now Steve doesn’t have to.

One of them losing life and limb for country should have been enough, but the war was greedy and it took them both.

Captain America falls unconscious into a river and someone pulls him to shore, someone a lot like you, who is and is not you. Steve doesn’t die of TB but he meets a girl right before the war who doesn't like to dance, at the same time Bucky’s reconsidering dodging the draft and it seals the deal, Steve is happy, and Bucky stays, Bucky leaves, Bucky doesn’t come back. Steve is born free, and his body matures like it should, and he enlists right of the bat, and just like Bucky he doesn't come back the same, but unlike Bucky he comes back. Steve dies of TB at age twenty-two and three days after they bury him, the classiest funeral Bucky can’t afford, James Buchanan Barnes dies on the operating table from injuries sustained, broken ribs, fractured skull, punctured lung, boot-shaped bruises that cause internal bleeding, because he made a promise to follow Steve Rogers into the jaws of death and he kept it. His body follows. His body remembers, even when his mind forgets and his heart is lost.

 

//

 

The Winter Soldier darkens a Manhattan fire escape with better rations than scalped cigarettes and coffee that’s lukewarm and mostly dirt and watches the sunrise, because he wants to. The metal is cold on his skin, hard on his body, and he can never eat enough, never regrow his lost limbs, never return the lives he took in service to yet another country and another war he didn’t sign up to. Several minutes pass in silence before the Winter Soldier has company.

Steve is just as striking under a Manhattan morning sun as he is atop the Alps. He presses colorful foil packets into the Winter Soldier’s hand and sets down a drink, the color and consistency of yellowing cardboard.

“Breakfast is inside. I hope you’re hungry.” It sounds like a joke. Half of it, anyway. Maybe Steve is getting better at being able to laugh about the tragedies of war their lives have become, always were, will be. After losing so much himself, it’s about time Steve found something to joke about.

“What would I do without my morning protein fix?”

“Starve,” Steve says. He’s not wrong. Or maybe he is, and it doesn’t matter.

Steve looks well-rested, a shadow of a smile over the set of his mouth that unconsciously reaches his eyes. He’s wearing clothes he slept in, ones he’s given to you to sleep in once, too. The elastic waistband on the pants is barely holding them up; the Winter Soldier could push them down with an exhale. Maybe Steve would let him.

The body is constantly wanting.

 _Steve_ , you say, an exhale directed nowhere.

Steve smiles, like he does every time. “Yeah, Buck, it’s really me.”

You have known every single version of Steve, but this one is not as familiar to you. When he pulls you off the table it's not Bucky he finds. He is as unfamiliar to you as you are, unknowingly, to him. You have him in the cross hairs and you almost pull the trigger. You follow instead. His secrets are intriguing, fascinating, his loneliness and heartbreak working as isolation, a slow creeping death that the Winter Soldier can empathise with.

The body is constantly remembering.

Steve brushes his hand across the Winter Soldier’s collarbone, clamping down for a brief second before flinching away, uncertain, coltish, inexperienced in the language of soft touch after so many years in a body wracked with pain. You can empathise.

The Winter Soldier’s chest expands at the touch and loss in rapid succession, tight with desire, feeling as though you might burst but knowing Steve will find his pieces and make him whole. The Winter Soldier knows the language of pain, but your body remembers other things, too.

Their hands tangle. Someone moves first but it remains unimportant compared to the way they both move next, gravitating and aligned in each other’s orbit, a metal hand buried in blonde hair, a mouth on skin and both of them soft, only clothing keeping them apart.

Steve pulls you in through the window and Bucky comes out the other side of the medical tent, arm in a sling and feeling foreign already. You have walked this camp in dreams and memories that change every time they are taken away, stripped of some detail that makes them less real to you. Just like you, your memories have been cut into and healed over until only scar tissue remains to show that something was there, that something needed to be removed in order to dehumanize you. Steve’s hand on Bucky’s shoulder anchors you against the crush of people celebrating, rifles discarded, drunk and singing and happy for the first time in years.

The feeling is infectious. You smile as much as your body allows, a shadow of Steve’s, even as the Hydra camp self-destructs and Bucky steps into a right hook meant for Steve and goes down hard, bell rung, ears popped, jaw aching. Steve says, _we’re going home, Buck_ , at the same time he says,  _I’m not gonna fight you_ , as he spits blood from a lung infection he’s not gonna sweat out and will most likely kill him four years before the war will finish what natural selection started. Steve, whole, smiling. Steve, fractured, smiling.

Steve carves a trail across continents and leads the way back home, stays with the men as much as he can until he belongs. This time Bucky shoulders his rifle and drops back into step beside him, not floating untethered, but not falling either.


End file.
